72 Coupe - 28 Years and Counting

[Bob Heine]

I graduated from night school in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in English and my wife asked me what I wanted for graduation. I said I wanted a Corvette and she let me go out and buy one. Found a green convertible four-speed 427-390 big block with 90,000 miles on it. Started fixing it up but didn’t invest in new tires right away. Spun out on US1 one night and totaled the car.

Wife wouldn’t let me fix the car and told me to go buy another one that didn’t need as much work. This 72 coupe automatic big block became mine in 1978 and has been with me ever since.

Replaced the worn Gilette tires with brand new Comp T/As and took the wedges out of the front springs.

Drove it to work every day and took it to several autocrosses the first few years I owned it. It smoked a little on startup but I figured it was valve seals. Before I got around to that project, an STP oil filter blew its seal and it was time to check the insides for damage. I was heartbroken, having to pull the engine and blueprint it at a friend's machine shop. While it was out, I also went through the TH499 and added a shift kit to the complete rebuild. Very very sad.

My wife lent a hand putting the engine and trans back in. Managed to squeeze it all back in without damaging any bodywork. Mostly due to her care holding the A/C compressor (we didn't open the system and it actually worked when everything went back together.

After four years, the thick layers of clear lacquer sprayed by a previous owner were crazing and cracking so I tried buffing the paint back to a shine. It was too far gone and in 1983 I got out the paint stripper and removed all the paint and planned to shoot some fresh black lacquer. I had helped a friend paint his '59 Corvette in his garage and the black lacquer looked good enough to take first place in his modified sports car class at the Miami World of Wheels show.

1983 was the year my job took over my life and the Corvette got moved to the back burner.

 

[Bob Heine]

I managed to work on the car from time to time but it was small stuff. Bought a spoiler from a friend who didn't get around to installing it. Moulded it in while repairing the busted up glass under the stock spoiler.

I never liked the egg crate grilles on the 70-72 Corvette. Ecklers sold a custom grille for 68-72s so I paid the $99.95 plus $3.75 shipping and fabricated a custom opening. The chrome on the stock front grilles was pitted so I didn't feel bad about cutting the light housings out.

The side grilles received a little work as well. A few hours with a hacksaw and some jewelers files eliminated all the vertical bars so the side grilles looked a little like the ones on a Maserati Ghibli.

My rear bumpers were pitted and I probably should have just had them rechromed, A Corvette buddy gave me a spare set from his '69 and they were in worse shape than mine. I always liked the look of the 61-62 rear bumper so I cut up the two sets of bumpers to make one pair of custom rear bumpers that don't have the dogleg next to the license plate opening. The rear pan had to be modified a little but the end result was an additional horizontal line added to the design.

The bumpers finally made it to the chrome plater in 2009. To further clean up the rear end, I replaced the stock lenses with their rings of chrome with some plain bubble lenses. Converted the backup lights to brake/parking so the four lights work in unison (like the C4 and newer Corvettes). Not sure it's the ultimate solution but I put a pair of backup lights on the battery and storage boxes. The following pictures show the changes (mine is the black one with the bumpers hung on temporarily).

 

[Bob Heine]

I scored an L-88 long hood at an Eckler's open house weekend. It was offered for less than half-price so I bought it and tried to mount it on the car. The hinge mounts were wrong and so were the latch plates. I cut slots in the hood frame and removed the plates, cut the plates out of the stock hood and put the new hood back together. Still doesn't fit quite right but that has become just another item on the list of work to be done.

In 1993 my company made an offer I couldn't refuse. A year's salary to leave the company and full pension plus medical benefits after 30 years service. If you did not have 30 years, you could get medical benefits for the bridge to 30 years. I had 29 so it was "work for a year to get a year's salary OR stay home for a year's salary." I jumped at the chance but they asked me to stay on for another year as a consultant. Hmmm two year's salary to work another year..... Already had the house and cars paid off and we had IRA and 401k accounts to fill in the gaps. Tiny tiny glitch -- I was 49 and would have to wait ten and a half years to tap into the retirement money or pay big penalties.

Retirement lasted about 7 months after I turned 50. The new job was as a consultant and required a week on-site in the DC area followed by a week working from home. My six-week contract ran out four years later with a savings account that just might last four years. Turning 59.5 in 2004 changed everything. Finally had the finances lined up and I'd be able to get back to work on the Vette.

Having a 91 year old mother is special. If you're lucky, she's independent and has all her faculties and reasonably good health. I was lucky but she was showing signs of failing memory and confusion over simple things. It was 2004 and I needed to take my mother's car away. She didn't have an accident but described how the road changed names for no reason (she had followed another driver into the turn lane and made a left without realizing it). Before the year was out she had fallen and forgot to use her life alert. Her six-room 1300 sq. ft. condo was filled with a lifetime of her most precious possessions and I decided to keep her there rather than move her to a tiny, strange room in a home (mine or an institution). It meant a round-the-clock live in aide, which her social security and pension almost covered. Aside from my daily visit and a few shopping trips, the highlight of her life was a luncheon outing every week or two with her grandson and seven of her nine great-grand children. On Mother's Day 2008, the day after their luncheon outing, my mother passed away.

That's MY crappy set of excuses for not working on my C3 all these years.

After 25 years up on blocks, I got the 72 Corvette big block running again in the summer of 2008. I did the oil change, primed the oil system and squirted some Marvel Mystery Oil in the cylinders. Hand cranked it though a dozen rotations and static timed the distributor. Added a couple of gallons of gas to the tank and gave the carb a quarter cup. Fresh battery and it fired on the second try.

With the car on jack stands, I started inspecting the running gear. I vaguely remembered a rumble in the rearend back in the 1980's so I checked the rear axle bearings. Figured I'd just grease the bearings and they'd be fine. When I pulled the half-shaft on the driver side, I noticed there was no cotter pin in the retaining nut. Also noticed there was no seal. Decided to pull the trailing arm and have a better look.

When I bought this car in 1978 the previous owner gave me a stack of receipts and among them was one for a rear bearing replacement. Looks like the shop that did the work didn't have the tools or experience to do the job. Instead of using the expensive and unique bearing press Chevrolet recommended, they used their Big Fat Hammer.

There wasn't supposed to be any play but when I tested the driver side it seemed to have more than .030" so I decided to use my own BFH to remove the axle stub. It eventually came out but it didn't look good.

 

[XLR8]

What an interesting tale... and one I'm looking forward to hearing more about! Don't leave us dangling long and keep the pix coming too!

Welcome to the

Jane Ann

 

[Bob Heine]

Thanks Jane Ann,
It's pretty boring stuff but hopefully there are more old folks out there who have their car gathering dust in the garage.

 

[Vettehead Mikey]

It's pretty boring stuff

I didn't think so! More please.

 

[Bob Heine]

The original plan was to use the rear bearing grease tool to re-pack the wheel bearings. While it was apart, replace the rusty parking brake parts with a stainless kit. Once I discovered the bearings were toast, moved on to plan B. Plan B was to buy all the tools and rebuild my own trailing arms. The price of the tools pushed me to plan C, where I would do some of the trailing arm work but have a specialty shop do the bearing setup.

Before sending my trailing arms off to Vtech Corvettes in Illinois, I bead-blasted the trailing arms as well as the hub and flange. Ground the ugliest flashing off the bearing carrier and put some gloss chassis paint on the trailing arms. Installed new poly bushings in the trailing arms and sent two boxes to Vtech.

Beautiful, new-looking trailing arms arrived a couple of weeks later. While I was waiting, I also ordered a set of rotors and came across an article showing how to gain some tire clearance without changing to offset trailing arms. The 16-inch rims and tires I bought back in the early 80s wouldn't fit without spacers. The tired rubbed on the e-brake cable so I cut the cable bracket off and took the arms to a local welding shop to have the brackets re-welded to the top of the arm.

This should be the end of my story because the engine runs, the rear axles are fixed and once the brakes are bled, the car should be driveable.

 

[Bob Heine]

Had a small leak in the under-car Hooker headers so I took them off and searched for the hole. It was the filler plate in the collector that seals the four runners where they join. Took the headers to several shops, including a race-car fabrication shop and they all told me it would be cheaper to just buy new ones. I bit the $700 bullet and now have Jet-Hot coated Hookers under the car.

Those headers sure made the rest of the exhaust system look bad so the next large box arriving at the house contained a Magnaflow 2.5-inch stainless system with x-pipe.

Just needed to have my neighborhood welder do a little work on the header adapter pipe but his welder was acting up. Knowing nothing about welding, I bought a flux-core wire welder for less than $100 and fabbed up my own pipes. They're plain steel made from a couple of Summit's mandrel bends, collector reducers and an O2 bung. sent the pipes to Jet Hot to be coated. While they were away, may as well paint the transmission crossmember so it doesn't look so crummy next to the new exhaust.

These Corvette sites are a nightmare. I search for advice on a little problem and the posts show an elegant (spendy) solution. My engine needed a little bling so I invested in a braided fuel line from Summit. Also bought a braided stainless hose and clamp cover kit. Another "while I'm at it moment" had me removing the pulleys and engine brackets to touch up the paint on the block.

I can't bring myself to spend a couple of grand on a March setup so I just bead-blasted the originals and had a guy 'chrome' powdercoat them. I installed the pulley on the water pump and discovered something was scraping. Took the pulley back off and turned just the hub on the pump -- scraping is coming from inside the pump. No problem -- I'll drain the coolant and replace the pump. Block drain is no problem but I can't find the petcock on the radiator. Vague memories of an engine mount failure with fan going through shroud and radiator. Installing the re-cored radiator and trying to close a seeping petcock with pliers causing entire petcock to come out. Emergency rubber plug is still in there. Oh yeah!

May as well pull the radiator and get it fixed. Hey, is that a rust hole in the radiator support?

No, it's a collection of holes held together by a coat of paint.

I don't want to do a frame-off restoration, but hey, while all that stuff is out of the way....

If those headlight mounts were out of the way, I could get better access to the front of the frame. And I could clean them up and paint them...

 

[Bob Heine]

That front crossmember had to come off, along with the bumper support and that exposed the grille area. A little semi-gloss paint and it looked better.

A little gloss paint on the front crossmember and engine. The new aluminum water pump arrives but it's cast iron so it went back. Couldn't wait so the old pump got painted so I could put the pulleys and brackets on. Looks better...

Now the valve cover and intake manifold look terrible. Long as I'm going to polish the water pump, might as well get a natural cast intake. A few hours with die-grinders, sanders and buffing wheels and I have shiny stuff for the engine (valve cover on the left hasn't been polished yet)...

I had the valve covers off so a set of roller rockers seemed logical. Couldn't find a bracket for the fuel filter so I had to make one. Found a 1/8 thick 1-inch aluminum stock at Home Depot so I just made a right-angle bend in the vice and then wrapped the aluminum around an old 13/16 spark plug socket. No more flopping fuel filter...

 

[hoosierdaddy]

Just loved this. . . . . . . Want more

Awesome story, awesome pictures and awesome project. Just couldn't get enough of it, more would be good. Oh yeah AWESOME rebirth

Bill

 

[Bob Heine]

Thanks Bill,
It's been a long haul but I have so much fun working on it that I thought I'd share. Just watched a 72 big block 4-speed go for $22K at Mecum.

I read a real long post describing the problems with the air conditioning and one of those floating memories came back. My blower didn't run at the highest speed but it cooled the car reasonably well. After the engine rebuild it didn't work as well so I did a little snooping and noticed that I had a couple of holes in the evaporator housing -- probably done trying to shoehorn the assembled 454 and TH400. Took the housing out and noticed signs that the heater core had been leaking and the evaporator looked old and tired. Not to mention the insect carcasses filling the lower half of the enclosure.

Once the evaporator box is all patched up and primed, I decided to test fit it to be sure everything fits. It fit fine so I took it out and gave it a couple of coats of semi-gloss black. It had been so long since I had worked on this area of the car I wasn't sure if the box needed to be installed before the headers or the other way around. I already had the headers bolted in so I soon found out the box needs to be put in first. The rocker covers were already out of the way so it slid in place without so much as a scratch (Lots of terry hand towels help here). Plenty of room....

I was napping under the car one afternoon (hey, I'm old!) and the back end of the car started talking trash. There was fresh paint up front but the back looked nasty. Decided to replace the u-joints on the half-shafts and driveshaft. Far as I new, the gear lube had only been pumped out once so it seemed like a good time to clean things up. Once it was out and the fluid drained, I pushed a magnet through the sludge in the bottom. No sign of shavings and things looked pretty good once it was washed out.

I wanted to replace the seals but because there was no sign of seepage at the pinion, decided to leave that one alone. Pulled the side yokes and seals and noticed the needle bearings. Bought a puller and got them out and replaced. No obvious signs of wear but "while it's apart" and yada yada. Put it back together and gave the brackets and frame pieces some gloss black and the banjo a couple of coats of Eastwood's stainless epoxy.

The u-joints had grease fittings so I thought it would be a good idea to replace them with some heavier duty pieces. The driveshaft joints came apart with no problems but the halfshaft joints wouldn't give. Dropped them at a shop I trusted on a Tuesday morning and was told they'd be ready next morning. Next morning I arrived to find an angry man who had a bunch of unpaid invoices. The shop was empty, including a couple of two-post lifts. My halfshafts were gone and over the next couple of weeks of his phone going straight to voice mail, I gave up. Bought a couple of heavy duty halfshafts (with Spicer joints) on Ebay and put the rear end back together. Had a lot of fun balancing the trailing arms while replacing the pivot bolt. My bubba method of refilling the gear oil and additive involves a funnel, heater hose and a length of copper tubing (leftover from a plumbing project). By accident it was just the right length to be able to pour in some gear oil and then hang it from the fender lip to drain completely. I used to spill a half a cup of gear oil trying to squeeze it from the plastic bottle. Didn't mind when it was two bucks a quart.

 

[Toms007]

This is a great story, I'm loving every minute.

 

[Bob Heine]

When my friend was blueprinting my engine at his fully-equipped shop (his father started a small engine repair shop but he wanted to do offshore boat race engines) he gave me a used Edelbrock intake that was sitting on a shelf. It was a low-profile piece meant for better fuel mileage (remember, we had a gas crisis at the end of the 70s). I was in a rush to get the car back on the road back then so I didn't look very carefully at the manifold and without the Internet, it was hard to find out much about the Streetmaster II. It wasn't designed for performance but I used it because it was so much lighter than the cast iron stock manifold. When I pulled it off the engine, there appeared to be a slight mismatch in the manifold ports (compared to the head ports).

The Summit manifold wasn't quite as bad but I decided to do a little port matching anyway.

[RANT]Please don't bust my chops about the "Made in China" intake. Wife and I have been buying GE appliances for almost 50 years. The washer and dryer - made in China, the microwave oven - Malaysia, the refrigerator/freezer - Mexico and the stove doesn't even give a country of origin but it sure doesn't say Made in the USA. So GE made billions in profit last year and paid NO US income tax and I'm the bad guy?[/RANT]

During some down time waiting for parts to arrive, I noticed the brake line fittings at the calipers were mangled by some Bubba years ago. I'd like to think it was someone else but I'm pretty sure it was me -- when line wrenches were an unaffordable and unnecessary luxury. I had a momentary thought about making up my own lines but there's still way too much Bubba in me. Inline Tube sent a full set of stainless brake lines for a little more than the price of a tank of gas for my son's Suburban (he needs it, with 7 children). Trust me, the new lines look way better than anything I could have done...

The brake line replacement reminded me why people do the frame-off thing. I seem to recall Lars posting that spark plug changes were a lot easier if you just lift the body off. Two of the line clamps were mounted to the frame before the body was put in place. One was barely visible and had to be loosened (and tightened) by feel rather than sight.

The other was too tight to break free with just the tips of an open end so I ground down one of my quarter-inch throwaway sockets so it fit the tight space using a little breaker bar.

 

[hoosierdaddy]

Awesome . . . . . . . History at its best!

I must say again, not only is this an awesome story but pictures to go with it that are great as well. All together this story and the illustrated pictures are worthly of publication in Hot Rod or one of the custom magizines circulated today. Always wanted to do a frame off restoration of a 1972 LT-1 but not sure I either have the energy or $$$$.$$ to do it today not to mention this late in the game if I want to do it for someone else to enjoy the benefits of it either :confused but year or two away from retirement and still thinking about it so you never know

Again I'm loving this play by play, I salute you for giving this classic new life

Bill

 

[DaveH_RRTX]

Great pictures and narrative. I am definitely hooked! Please continue to update, I really want to see how it all finished out. I'm hoping to begin my own trail of tears on an early C3 soon.

Sounds a lot like we are about the same age, of the same era.

Keep up the great work, you now have a fan club.

 

[Bob Heine]

Bill,
I know what you mean about doing all the work for someone else. My son-in-law doesn't care about cars of any kind -- he's more into fishing boats. He thought it would be great to give the 72 to his sons to play with when they were old enough to drive.

Hmmm, my teenage grandsons taking their big block to high school. Hey, it's an old car so insurance should be cheap. Only $50 to fill it up. Sounds like a great plan until they break one of the spendy bits. With six grandsons from age 8 to 20 it's an easy decision -- none of them should be looking for a giant bow and package in their driveway.

I totaled the big block in my first post when I was 33 and the $3,500 was hard-earned savings, not a gift from someone else (my wife let me buy it with money I earned and she helped save). I worked to make money so my wife could stay home and take care of me -- oh yeah, and the two kids. The kids are grown and when my daughter's two get together with my son's seven, it's a pretty big party. Last year I started the big block and the two heirs apparent held their noses -- first non catalyst-equipped car they had ever been close to.

I thought I could do the C3 without spending much money but as soon as you get into it, the 'while I'm at its' start creeping in. This story is about to head into that very dark place.

 

[hoosierdaddy]

Well said, and then think about it before saying it again!

Last year I started the big block and the two heirs apparent held their noses -- first non catalyst-equipped car they had ever been close to.

Not sure generations today can really appreciate all the blood, sweat and tears that goes into something like this thus the true appreciate is not there. I thought if I did do a frame off restoration of a 72 LT-1, When I hit my final power shift I would buy the extra plots, have a trust to EPA proof it and be buried in it, is that selfish maybe but wouldn't that be

Love the way you think, nothing sounds like a Chevrolet big block

Bill

 

[Bob Heine]

Thanks Dave,
It's a long story but it isn't over by a long shot. I think Trail of Tears should be its own forum. I replaced the whole a/c system on my '87 and that sure was a wet one.

 

[Bob Heine]

When I hit my final power shift I would buy the extra plots, have a trust to EPA proof it and be buried in it, is that selfish maybe but wouldn't that be

Love the way you think, nothing sounds like a Chevrolet big block

Bill

Bill,
The thought never entered my mind (OK, it did but my ancestors set up a small cemetery in New York -- it would be greedy to use that much space). Wife has instructions to cremate me and have my ashes sprinkled into the fiberglass (sorry, SMC) resin at the factory.

Ah the sound of a big block. When I started it up for the granskids, wife gave strict instructions to put a cork in it. No open headers because that had already frightened too many adult visitors.

I agree about the generation gap. Video games are my grandchildren's reality. Years ago I took my two oldest grandsons to Moroso Motorsports Park for a AA Fueler night. They never asked to go again. I mean, I warned them it would be loud.

 

[ernestD]

WOW!really cool pictures and story!